Quick start - Microsoft Teams for Education admins

Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, meetings, files, and apps together in one place. Because it’s built on Office 365, schools benefit from integration with their familiar Office apps and services. It delivers enterprise-grade security and compliance that is extensible and customizable to fit the needs of every school.

With Microsoft Teams, your school or institution can create collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, communicate with school staff, coordinate research across institutions, or more easily facilitate student life efforts like clubs or extracurricular activities – all from a single experience in Office 365 for Education.

Microsoft Teams saves time, deepens connections and simplifies everyday logistics. This allows staff to focus on their roles as educator, researchers, and leaders in your school or institution.

This guide is for IT admins in education, including those who haven't yet deployed Teams. This guide will help you get started with:

Enabling Teams for your school

Learning what kind of controls are available to manage Teams within your school

Finding partner services through references to external documentation

This guide is designed to get you started quickly with configuration recommendations specific to Teams in schools. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it is a good starting point.

If you've already deployed Teams (as a pilot or full deployment) and are looking for pointers on how to use Teams, see Microsoft Teams for Education.

Quick start - Teams planning guide

Step 1: Get your people together

Assemble a group of individuals from staff, educators, and the educator community to act as the stakeholder & decision-making group for your Teams deployment.

Step 2: Prioritize your scenarios

Collaboration and communication is about people! Pick the most relevant scenarios for your organization instead of talking about features and functions. Check out the Microsoft 365 FastTrack Productivity Library for examples to help you define scenarios for your school. Successful Teams deployments often center around highly collaborative teams that work closely together, such as classrooms, professional learning communities, and extracurricular student groups.

🏆 Best practice:

Plan Teams with Teams! Customers who use Teams to plan their deployment ease the change curve for key stakeholders. Consider creating a team called Microsoft 365 Deployment and creating channels for the various workloads you want to deploy. Your team might look something like this:

Step 3: Conduct pilots and deploy Teams

You’ll want to conduct an initial Teams pilot with your educators, both champions and early adopters, for one or more of the scenarios you selected above. A pilot gives you valuable information about how Office 365 and Teams are received in your organization. Select an interested group of users and a prioritized business scenario to get started.

Once your pilots are complete, you’ll have the feedback you need to plan your broad Teams deployment. Be sure your deployment plan integrates your prioritized scenarios to ensure your school is getting the most from Office 365 and Teams.

Step 4: Measure usage, manage satisfaction, and drive adoption

To successfully drive adoption of Office 365 and Teams, stay focused on your educator’s experience. Here’s a quick checklist of our best practices to get you started.

Study Office 365 activity reports to understand usage across your school. If you aren’t an Office 365 admin, ask your admin to give you Reports Reader permissions so you can access activity reports.

Capture feedback from your educators on their experience with Office 365 and Teams. Use a channel in Teams when your school has fewer than 5000 individuals. Use a public group in Yammer when your school is larger than this current membership limit in Teams.

Nurture your champions and highlight your wins. Reward educators for embracing these new tools and using them in innovative ways. This, above anything, ensures continued adoption of Office 365 and Teams.

Turn on or off Microsoft Teams Licenses

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Teams is a cloud-based service. Once an educator or student has a valid license and Teams has been enabled, they can run the desktop, web, and mobile Teams clients. They can install these clients themselves -- the IT admin doesn't need to deploy these clients. You can manage individual user licenses for Microsoft Teams by using the Microsoft 365 Admin Center or by using PowerShell. See Office 365 licensing for Teams for information about both methods. This is valuable to understand if you are interested in piloting Teams before broad enablement. Teams is not enabled by default for students. Teams must be enabled for students before they can access Teams. To get started, IT administrators need to use the Office 365 Admin Center to enable Microsoft Teams for your school.

Settings in the Microsoft Teams admin center are not managed based on user license type. Instead, we suggest that you define different policies to manage which capabilities are available to your users. To configure a policy, click the policy in the left navigation of the Microsoft Teams admin center. Here's an example of messaging policies.

With policies, you can turn on and turn off features at the per-user level. Here’s how policy assignments work:

By default, every new user will get the Global policy (tenant-level settings).

A user can be assigned a pre-canned user policy created by Microsoft if it meets your requirements. These pre-canned policies are not editable by admins. If you want to manage these in the future, create new custom policies and assign the custom policies to users.

A custom policy can be assigned to any user. To create a new custom policy, click Add, choose the settings you want for the policy, and click Save. Then assign the custom policy to a user by going to Users in the Microsoft Teams admin center or by using a script.

How to enable different policies for faculty and students

To have custom settings for faculty and students (for example, Chat is enabled for faculty but not for students), there are two methods to create and assign them:

Use the PowerShell module to run a script to create and assign multiple policies. See the Appendix for script examples and documentation.

In the Microsoft Teams admin center, create a new custom policy and assign the policy to users on the Users tab.

Note

Until a custom policy is assigned to a user, the user will be using the Global policy setting. This means that if Chat is enabled in the Global policy and disabled in the custom Student policy, until the custom policy is assigned to the student, the student can use Chat. In this case, it may be easier to disable Chat globally and use custom policies to enable Chat for faculty.

Appendix

How to create and assign a messaging policy

See whether any of the available policies in your tenants suit your requirements by running Get-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy.

Sample script

Distribute to clients

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Teams has clients available for web, desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux), and mobile (Android and iOS). These clients all require an active internet connection and do not support an offline mode. To get the latest details on the functionality and methods of distribution of each of these clients, check out our topic to Get clients for Teams.

The setup file for the Teams client is an executable file that can be downloaded by admins and end users from the Teams downloads page. Educators and students on desktops can install the application if they have the appropriate privileges. IT Admins can also distribute the installer and through their existing client distribution tools.

End users with mobile devices can download the Microsoft Teams app from the mobile platform’s app store.

Operating system requirements

Windows

MacOS

Linux

iOS

Android

7 and later

10.10 and later

DEB or RPM

10 or later

4.4 and later

Internet browser support

Teams fully supports the following Internet browsers, with noted exceptions for calling and meetings. This table applies to operating systems running on desktop computers.

Browser

Calling - audio, video, and sharing

Meetings - audio, video, and sharing123

Internet Explorer 11

Not supported

Meetings are supported only if the meeting includes PSTN coordinates. To attend a meeting on IE11 without PSTN coordinates, users must download the Teams desktop client.

Video: Not supported

Sharing: Incoming sharing only (no outgoing)

Microsoft Edge, RS2 or later

Fully supported, except no outgoing sharing

Fully supported, except no outgoing sharing

Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), the latest version plus two previous versions

Fully supported

Fully supported

Google Chrome, the latest version plus two previous versions

Fully supported

Fully supported

Sharing is supported without any plug-ins or extensions on Chrome version 72 or later.

Firefox, the latest version plus two previous versions

Not supported

Meetings are supported only if the meeting includes PSTN coordinates. To attend a meeting on Firefox without PSTN coordinates, users must download the Teams desktop client.

Video: Not supported

Sharing: Incoming sharing only (no outgoing)

Safari 11.1+

Not supported

Meetings are supported only if the meeting includes PSTN coordinates. To attend a meeting on Safari without PSTN coordinates, users must download the Teams desktop client.

Video: Not supported

Sharing: Incoming sharing only (no outgoing)

Safari is enabled on versions higher than 11.1 in preview. While in preview, there are known issues with Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention.

1 To give and take control of shared content during sharing, both parties must be using the Teams desktop client. Control isn't supported when either party is running Teams in a browser. This is due to a technical limitation that we're planning to fix. To learn more, read Allow a participant to give or request control.

2 Blur my background isn't available when you run Teams in a browser. This feature is only available in the Teams desktop client.

3 Teams meetings on browsers are limited to a single incoming video feed of active speaker.

Note

As long as an operating system can run the supported browser, Teams is supported on desktop computers. For example, running Firefox on the Linux operating system is an option for using Teams.

For mobile operating systems, we recommend that you run the Teams app, available from the Android and iOS stores. Running Teams in a mobile operating system is supported, but many features are unavailable.